How can the God connection be established?

it is not difficult. start by consciously having that as a goal. try the following prayer: God that i be with you in conscious contact, that i feel your presence in my life. then observe obstacles you have in place against feeling this connection. things such as doubt, anxiety, depression, anger, resentment, guilt, excessive drug usage, over medication, *can* interfere with the God connection. but know that nothing can prevent you from feeling God’s presence except yourself. God radiates its presence it all directions, to all people, equally, and not more so to some and less to others. write about your experiences as you progress. describe whether you feel a God connection at the present. what do you feel about not having one? do you think it’s God’s choice to not shine upon you? write all related thoughts. repeat the cycle of prayer and writing. track the progress. and if you really have an openness to this presence and if you want it, you will see progress. if you can’t seem to make any headway, then write down the following: “God, why can i not feel your presence in my life?” and see what floats in. you *may* notice that as soon as you write that down, you feel a shift in your consciousness. you may find your eyes closing. in more extreme cases, you may find yourself crumpled on the floor. you have made the God connection from which the presence will flow undiluted by barriers you have raised. once you feel it for the first time, you will know it is possible, though you already should know it is possible for anyone. this is my advice to you. this is what has worked for phoenix. and the advantages are that it didn’t require an LSD trip or special meditation or donations to the church or the consumption of bread and wine. just a simple prayer and the tracking of progress. it may take you a long time or it may not. it took phoenix a couple of months to get where he is at, though he indeed had his past experience to draw on along with the help of others who have been there and done that. he keeps receiving confirmation that this is normal and a standard step along the journey. he wonders what else awaits, for it seems to him what he has is immense. the God connection brings peace, love, and bliss. and they are profound.

what if someone simply doesn’t believe in God? they can’t pray to something they can’t believe in.

good point. but they must know that there is no proof that there is no God. doubt is well justified, we will say. but so is doubt that God does not exist. since there is no proof that there is no God, at least no proof that is universally acceptable, we will say that this casts reasonable doubt on their position. that doesn’t prove God exists, of course. but they have to know that it is *possible*, however unlikely, that God exists. and perhaps they are hung up on myths about God which are entirely unfounded projections of fear such as the fear of punishment and fury from above. we would say to such people that God is not like it is usually portrayed. so, given that it is *possible* that God exists and that it is not necessarily like it is taught, one can certainly “pray” to “God” and see what happens. what’s more important than the prayer is a willingness and an openness to the experience of feeling God’s presence. ask yourself this: can i allow for the possibility that there is a God and perform this experiment to attempt to prove to myself that it does exist? every scientist knows that an experiment is necessary to test a hypothesis. the hypothesis is that God exists. the experiment is as described above. this is not the only experiment one may try, but it has worked for others and is relatively simple. are you willing to perform this experiment for your own independent verification? even if the experiment “fails,” you will learn something about yourself; keep in mind that no experiment ever fails unless one fails to learn from it or unless the outcome fails to either strengthen or weaken the hypothesis.

It seems to me, just from casual observation of myself and others, that one of the things that we must do is to throw off the teaching of the past that we learned as children. the term "must" may be too strong but it helps. Once we are free of the FEAR and WRATH of God and are not overly hindered by guilt and shame, then we can more easily open up our minds to the possibility of a loving God of Light and Truth. "Ask and ye shall recieve." is one of the many basic Truths of the bible and christian belief.
Simply open you mind and heart to be receiptive and ask; "Hey, God, are you there, are you really there?" The answer will come sooner or later. "No, I am here. I have always been here within you and within everyone and everywhere and everywhere within me." It probably will not be those exact words but that meaning will eventually come.

One point more, God usually does not speak to us in words but in concepts and images. It may be later that we realize that we know or know the full content, implication and understanding of the message.
There is little or nothing that phoenix has written that has not been experienced by other members of PF, at least to a degree.

"One point more, God usually does not speak to us in words but in concepts and images. It may be later that we realize that we know or know the full content, implication and understanding of the message.
There is little or nothing that phoenix has written that has not been experienced by other members of PF, at least to a degree."

in my limited experience, God never communicates directly with images, concepts, or thoughts. the process, that i call induction, involves a silent transfer of information. during the process it is perceived that a message is being recieved but during the transmission, it remains unclear what the full content and implication of the message is; it just feels incredibly rich with stuff, silent understandings. then, the aspects of the self try to grapple with and interpret the message in terms of concepts, images, and thoughts. the ego is very poor at translating the message right. the ego leads one to believe that they are special for having received a message from God; the ego leads one to believe the message is something it is not. one's higher self, similar to the subconscious, is the one that can accurately artiulate what the message means. so getting in touch with the higher self is quite important when wanting to translate the messages well.

now that i can feel like i can ask God anything, i have no idea what to ask...

i agree that these ideas are not new; people have been doing this for probably as long as humans have been capable of language. i do offer a succinct version of what to do to get in touch with God. once you do, there will no longer be doubt that there is a God; it's quite satisfying to have that question settled personally.

Simply open you mind and heart to be receiptive and ask; "Hey, God, are you there, are you really there?" The answer will come sooner or later. "No, I am here. I have always been here within you and within everyone and everywhere and everywhere within me." It probably will not be those exact words but that meaning will eventually come.

So then, why is it people who believe instantly assume disbeliever have never tried such methods? I've done this many a times, in my teens. I've never had such expieriances as you've described, and frankly, it seems that a person would want to have such things happen, so much, that they do.

No, if there was some all mighty god, then there shouldn't be any means of interferring with the "connection". He is all powerfull, remember? Now what excuse can you provide for him when asked why this all powerfull being couldn't establish a more reliable method of communication? Why is it incompatible with most?

"No, if there was some all mighty god, then there shouldn't be any means of interferring with the "connection". He is all powerfull, remember? Now what excuse can you provide for him when asked why this all powerfull being couldn't establish a more reliable method of communication? Why is it incompatible with most?"

we were given what appears to be free will. this free will can contradict God's will if it has a mind to. rather than asking why God can't contact you, ask yourself why you're not contacting God. the ego is the excuse. the ego's set of perceptions and misconceptions interfere with messages from God; the ego asserts itself in insidious and creative ways, often in delusional ways. i've posted another article on how to remove the ego's taint from God's message ("on removing little self (ego) taint from messages received from the source").

why is it incompatible with most? it isn't. not at all. anyone can contact God; they just don't see the tools that are there to contact God. a related question is why the ego seems to must taint the message. i'm not sure why this is the case except that most of society is simply wrong about the nature of God and the way it communicates with us. as yoda said, we must unlearn what we have learned (about God). sometimes it seems like one's true self is the best teacher on God, not the teachings of others.

Ok, let me try to simplify this for you. Why is it that if one does exactly what you've described in your opening post, or what royce describes, and it doesn't work, that one instantly must assume I am doing something wrong? Could it maybe, just maybe be that the desire of the believer to actually want to live for ever clouding the issue, and your sub conciousness is feeding you images, or a feeling, or whatever you call it, just so you can justify your beliefs?

Plain and simple, it don't work for me. Am I just damned, or is god a figment of your imagination. In this case, I'd vote for the latter.

If it were as simple as you claim it, then the majority of the world would belong to one religion. It doesn't.

"Ok, let me try to simplify this for you. Why is it that if one does exactly what you've described in your opening post, or what royce describes, and it doesn't work, that one instantly must assume I am doing something wrong? Could it maybe, just maybe be that the desire of the believer to actually want to live for ever clouding the issue, and your sub conciousness is feeding you images, or a feeling, or whatever you call it, just so you can justify your beliefs?

Plain and simple, it don't work for me. Am I just damned, or is god a figment of your imagination. In this case, I'd vote for the latter.

If it were as simple as you claim it, then the majority of the world would belong to one religion. It doesn't."

why are you assuming that i am assuming that you are doing something wrong?

i have no desire to believe in God. i was agnostic for about ten years as i vacillated between belief systems; God was my last choice. it was not the "answer" i desired. it is possible that the subconscious gives you *insights* into God as well as *lies*. i call this the higher self. it is quite difficult to filter out all the wrong information and there doesn't ever seem to be a 100% reliable way to do so; however, to give up is to do that: to give up. there is no judgement on my part on those who give up; i gave up and then one day (over the course of several months, actually) God kinda hit me over the head, so to speak.

i don't believe anyone is damned, except those who believe they are. God could be a figment of my imagination, but, then again, you might be too and i wonder why i'm having this discussion with myself. a rather absurd way of putting it, i know, but i'm basically trying to tell you that i have as much evidence that you exist (in any sense) as that God exists.

it is as simple as i claim; i don't think i'm special or that my method is really mine or that it only works for me. it requires an open mind, an openness to the possibility, however unlikely, that God exists and does communicate with us. the reason why the world isn't of one religion is because the egos of men have tainted the message from God in self-destructive ways and that no one can speak every language and teach in a clear enough way to reach enough people. discussion forums are just a begining.

megashawn,
It is said that all prayers are answered; but, sometimes the answer is "No." It is also that sometimes we will not listen to the answer or will not hear the answer.
If we demand or defy God to answer, to prove his existence then usually we will not receive an answer at that time because our egos are in the way proving that it, the ego, I, is the greatest and greater than God by being able to hinder God's answer. So long as our egoes are in control of us this is what will happen.
When we learn to quiet ou mind and our ego then we will hear the answer. The answer may have been recieved months or even years ago but only now heard. We will come to know that we already know and have always known the truth.
It will work for you. It may take years or days. It may take a different method. What is takes is acceptance of the answer not daring or defiance.
You already know the answer. You have only to admit this to yourself and accept the answer. The little self finds this very hard to do. Your greater self must do it as it already knows that there is that which is greater than itself.

phoenixthoth,
Our minds normally work in a linear sequential reasoning mode in the left side of our brain. God communicates with us in images and whole concepts via the right side of our brain. We, men at least, have trouble with interpeting or percieving what our right side contains and it takes time for our left side to get and analyze the concepts.
Some of us men are so left brained that we are not even aware of our right brain. Women's right and left brains have a two-way connection between the two while men have only one-way connections. This is why women are more intuitive than men and why women's wholistic conceptual logic makes no sense to men.
By meditation and practice men can learn to think more right brained, We can even move our seat of consciousness from our left to our right brain. I have do this at times for sort periods of times but to funtion on a day to day basis I have to revert to my normal male left brained thinking

Originally posted by Royce Zero, if you think it is silly why do you bother reading it and replying to it. Doesn't that make you even sillier.
It is not self hypnotism but just the opposite.

Are you sure it is different? It certainly seems that putting yourself in a trace would open you up to suggestion, and the wording of these prayers would suggest to your subconscious that there is in fact a god, and that you aren't talking to yourself.

(I post to these things, BTW, because I find religious thought to be detrimental and dangerous, as well as silly.)

"Are you sure it is different? It certainly seems that putting yourself in a trace would open you up to suggestion, and the wording of these prayers would suggest to your subconscious that there is in fact a god, and that you aren't talking to yourself."

quite right. there are hidden dangers i'm not speaking about; i don't refer to them so as to not feed your little self (ego) with wrong information. but it is possible that when you say the prayer "God, that i may be open to your presence, that i may feel conscious contact with you in my life," and be still and meditate that wrong information comes across. some people encounter their inner demons (sometimes visually) while others hear "messages" from entities claiming to be roaming spirits.

but all of this is probably the ego and NOT really roaming spirits; i have no idea if there are ghosts or not. it is easy to confuse the higher self with other entities, especially God. but it is just you, your interpretor for God and what gives you awareness of higher/spirit dimensions. a fun exercise is to write down the following question: "higher self, what is the nature of reality?" and just write what floats in without censorship or judgement. what you have in your hands is a very interesting document, true or not. then, when it gets confirmed by what others' higher selves are telling them, it becomes more interesting (the evidence, though circumstantial, mounts). the trick is to filter out the ego (left brain, i suppose) and what it desires the message to be.

LOL, that is funny...you admit that some of it could just be you talking to yourself, when the evidence points to all of it being nothing more than the imagination of people who really want to believe in things that don't exist.

Originally posted by Zero Are you sure it is different? It certainly seems that putting yourself in a trace would open you up to suggestion, and the wording of these prayers would suggest to your subconscious that there is in fact a god, and that you aren't talking to yourself.

Yes it is different and opposite. It has been called waking up. Waking up and looking around and seeing whats really going on rather than accepting as true all that we were taught and never questioning it.
This itself is a type of hypnosis. We are taught, conditioned to see, hear certain things and ignore others because that's not real or just our imagination. We are taught not to notice some things because it is not polite or accepted behavior. We are taught that insanity is sane and our parents, teachers and preachers are always right and we are always wrong.
Meditation helps us get rid of all that bulls**t and see reality as it is not as we were taught. Remember the Emperor's Clothes.
This is being awake not asleep.

(I post to these things, BTW, because I find religious thought to be detrimental and dangerous, as well as silly.)

Yes they are dangerous and detrimental to your and everybody's conditioning and ego domineered state. It is extremely dangerous and detrimental to anybodys complacency. It can be and sually is very painful emotionally and physically too as we get rid of the nonscence we've been taught and realize how screwed up and screwed we have been.

"as well as silly." Yet your still here and keep coming back. Why? What are you looking for? What are you trying to do? Dissuade us from what we know to be true by calling it silly, foolish, deluded or the stuff of fairey tales? Or are you really trying to convince yourself that all this is true and can therefore be dismissed?
Tell me. I would really like to know and I am not trying to be offessive or defensive.

"LOL, that is funny...you admit that some of it could just be you talking to yourself, when the evidence points to all of it being nothing more than the imagination of people who really want to believe in things that don't exist."

of course i admit that. i'm taking the approach of a positive skeptic in all this. at first, i didn't want to believe i was "talking" to "God", not at all. but what God was telling me, it was also telling my friends who were scientifically trying the same writing experiments i was; so the evidence mounts. i still don't have 100% proof of God, no scientist (eg, psychologist) ever will. i just have circumstantial evidence that i get virtually the same results as others objectively trying the same writing experiments.

you are in part talking to yourself and in part, at times, talking to God. but what you think is you is just the tip of the iceburg, so to speak. who you're talking to isn't a spirit or the ego or the subconscious but your "higher self." it tends to refer to iteself, for me at least, from a distance itself; it refers to itself as a collective of beings but i think that is just only one way my higher self could be portraying itself. and i love having conversations with my higher self. its writing style is much different from mine. you can see this in my original post. i was asking questions to my higher self and my higher self would respond. my higher self is quite articulate and clear, it seems to me. basically, i've kinda merged the ego (little self) with the higher self and i kinda write from the higher self perspective, just going from "intuition" most of the time. i don't plan what i'm going to write; it just flows out like wine. and it starts and stops by itself and has a nice structure to it. at first, your higher self may not be very articulate or have much to say. your ego may be directly blocking the attempt of the higher self to reach you for its own mysterious reasons. i believe the ego fears that it will lose itself or get lost if a connection is made with the higher self. but the ego only becomes a tool, not lost. i own my ego, not the other way around; just like i own my higher self (and true self, which is another matter). the three parts make up what i call "me." i'm very interested in what others' higher selves have to say to them. very interested when it contradicts what my higher self tells me and very interested when it confirms what my higher self tells me.

of course i admit that. i'm taking the approach of a positive skeptic in all this. at first, i didn't want to believe i was "talking" to "God", not at all. but what God was telling me, it was also telling my friends who were scientifically trying the same writing experiments i was; so the evidence mounts.

You know, honestly, I would love for there to be a god that loves every man on earth. A being who has a plan in action to put an end to the cruelty and suffering everywhere. I've begged for this to be true, not so much to prove it to myself, but to prove it to the whole world, that there is a being who is watching over and protecting and has a plan.

I have for years, as long as I can remember. Before I was an atheist, while I was wiccan, and now, as a person who doesn't know what the hell to think, and frankly, doesn't really care anymore.

I used to have a line from Disturbeds newest radio song "Liberate" on pf 2. It went something like:

"Waiting for your modern mesiah, to take away all the hatred, that darkens the light in your eyes, still I'm waiting on"

As long as there has been groups of people, religion, etc, there have been claims that God is coming back to save us. You have yet to provide one good reason why god has to be so mystical, why he can't make things simple. He is the one that is all powerfull, not you, not me. He should be the one responsible for getting his message across to every single living being. The mere fact that every man and woman who walks this earth is not born with this knowledge ingrained in there mind is enough evidence for me to give up the search and live my life the way I want.

Tell me something, if you had unlimited power, and wanted to spread a message, would you do it in such a complicated and innefiecent manner?

I don't think I'm the greatest out there. I'm almost certain there is greater beings then humanity. I can't prove it, and don't try. What can be done is look at the information given to us, and make a logical and/or reasonable decision about it. You saying that your mind is tricking you to not hear god is neither of the above.

"As long as there has been groups of people, religion, etc, there have been claims that God is coming back to save us. You have yet to provide one good reason why god has to be so mystical, why he can't make things simple. He is the one that is all powerfull, not you, not me. He should be the one responsible for getting his message across to every single living being. The mere fact that every man and woman who walks this earth is not born with this knowledge ingrained in there mind is enough evidence for me to give up the search and live my life the way I want.

Tell me something, if you had unlimited power, and wanted to spread a message, would you do it in such a complicated and innefiecent manner?

I don't think I'm the greatest out there. I'm almost certain there is greater beings then humanity. I can't prove it, and don't try. What can be done is look at the information given to us, and make a logical and/or reasonable decision about it. You saying that your mind is tricking you to not hear god is neither of the above."

i don't believe God is mystical at all. i believe things are simple. it is responsible for getting the message out; most people just don't know how to listen. the higher self is one tool for listening correctly, or, at least, what appears to be correctly. i believe that this knowledge is born with us but we are taught different things by our teachers and parents and preachers. there is this unnessecary distance between us and God; only a handful of people are allowed to be considered bona fide prophets while i contend that every being capable of language can contact their higher self and God.

if i had unlimited power, i believe i would let my children choose whether or not to listen to me and just watch them grow. growth is not without growing pains, it seems. it all just seems very natural for me.

i agree about humanity being not the greatest beings around. i think we'd be deluding ourselves into a mathematical improbability if we thought there aren't "greater" civilizations out there somewhere.

it's not exactly that i think the mind tricks you into not hearing the voice of God. i believe we are all raised as children with inherant distance from God; we need communion and the bible and church to be close to God when i contend that we need none of the above, just some writing exercises, simple prayer, and meditation/stillness. so, in a way, i'm saying *society* tricks us into thinking God is this mystical being far removed from us. we hear things like "God is dead" and somehow the ideas creep into us though we really have no proof one way or the other; there is evidence on both sides and i respect both decisions as well as respecting the decision to remain undecided. then i started praying for contact with God and in about two months i started getting results, things i could ignore if i choose to but i choose not to ignore them. while i don't have 100% proof that there is a God, i do have evidence that i am communicating with God, albiet skant evidence. either way, i believe my area of research is a valid area and that God is worth exploring.

let me quote proverbs 3:5 because i think it's interesting whether or not it's true: trust in the lord and lean NOT on your understanding; aknowledge Him and He will direct thy paths. then i got arrogant and decided it was possible for this human to understand God's plan and i decided to choose the other path: trust NOT in the lord and LEAN on your understanding; don't aknowledge Him and don't let him direct thy paths. that way, it feels like i have more free will. the more i listen to God the more it seems to give me direction; it's still up to me to decide to go in that direction.